Losing It
by AngelCeleste85
Summary: Songfic - Losing It, by Rush. Meg has lost her chance at a career in dancing, but Erik and Christine have each lost something more precious. Not that, get your mind out of the sewer, lol! R&R please. Fair warning, it's another of my usual angst-fests.


Losing It By AngelCeleste85  
  
Disclaimer: The usual. If I owned PTO I sure as hell wouldn't be up at three in the morning writing these little stories. And I also don't own the rights, tune or lyrics of "Losing It," if you're looking for the men who do, contact the band Rush. In short, don't sue me.  
  
Blame: A not-so-good night for my self-confidence and a talk with someone who knows a fair amount about music, talking time signatures, in which this song was brought up as an example. And Melpomene has struck again, she's not popping up yet in my current work-in-progress named for her cousin, but oh, did she strike with a vengeance here! Angst, angst and more angst!  
  
Other notes: Erik is, as the Leroux book implies, somewhere in his fifties by now. Timing is five years after the night of "Don Juan Triumphant." Enjoy, and please feed me!  
// Lyrics to "Losing It" by Rush //  
{{ Meg's thoughts }}  
[[ Erik's thoughts ]]  
(( Christine's thoughts ))  
  
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Losing It By AngelCeleste85  
  
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"Keep in time, Giry. Lift your feet, straighten those ankles, you know better than to let your ankles sag by now! You know this role, dance like you mean it!" Madame Giry was a gentle woman usually, but in the matter of the ballet she showed no mercy whatsoever, not even to her own daughter. And that, Meg knew, was as it should be no matter how she resented it.  
  
// The dancer slows her frantic pace in pain and desperation //  
  
{{ I can't! Maman, I can't! }}  
  
// Her aching limbs and downcast face aglow with perspiration //  
  
The role was difficult, she had worn the red shoes for it before now but it had been years ago, as understudy to La Sorelli. Her mother had driven Meg even harder than she had driven the former prima ballerina, not that she had ever been anything less than a taskmistress on the ballet rats before. Meg had had to work three times as hard as any of the rats, and for longer hours and more years, than any of them and had never been considered for a prima role! Her mother could only apologize to her sadly, saying that the rats would always see favoritism and that could cost them both their jobs.  
  
// Stiff as wire, her lungs on fire with just the briefest pause! //  
  
Perhaps it was the older woman's impending retirement that put such a bite into her words, but in any case the cutting comments she had made to Meg in all those rehearsals .  
  
Meg reached the very peak of the performance, paused as the violins and the flute sang out their long, high, sweet note.  
  
Her ankles hurt.  
  
"Hold the position!" Meg heard her mother's words from memory.  
  
Her ankles were trembling, knees were not going to - "Hold the position!"  
  
She could not hold it any longer.  
  
// Then flooding through her memory the echoes of old applause. //  
  
Meg fell forward, and the crash of her knees on the boards sounded like the lid of her coffin: dull, hollow, and bitter, an empty echo of the applause that should have been and never would now. Like the tears that flowed down her cheeks.  
  
Instinctively she sought a face in the crowd that she knew: she dared not face her mother now. In the infamous Box Five, her old friend Christine Daae, who had come here only this one night to see Meg's first performance in a prima role that was truly hers, stood alone gazing at the dancer with pity open on her face. Christine would understand: she had been a dancer, too, in the chorus before giving up her chance of. but the other woman turned away.  
  
That pity was, in its own way, as awful as the stares of the audience, as accusing as the stares her mother must be shooting at her across the auditorium.  
  
// And she limps across the floor //  
  
She got to her feet under her own power, though the fall to her unprotected knees had been hard, and limped slowly off the stage. She couldn't meet anyone's eyes.  
  
{{ The bitterest failures are in the things we want the most, the things that we know we could have done. and yet it seems sometimes God laughs at us. I could have done it. I know I could have.. But I'll never get the chance again. I will never be looked at as a dancer again. }}  
  
// And closes her bedroom door. //  
  
Meg held back the tears until she heard the reassuring click of the door latching behind her, threw the bolt, and collapsed again in the center of the floor. For the first time in years, she paid no attention to the dirt on the bare floor that soiled her pristine white tights or the tears that spotted and stained her costume: the lonely dancer just wrapped her arms around herself and wept for her shattered dreams.  
  
{{ Where do I go from here, now that I've lost it? }}  
  
~*~*~*~*~*~ At the same time ~*~*~*~*~*~*~  
  
[[ Think, Erik. It has to make sense musically, but you've got the idea already, now bring it forward! ]]  
  
// The writer stares with glassy eyes, defies the empty page //  
  
But the recalcitrant ideas would not sound their musical voices in his head anymore, they had not in the five years it had been since her marriage to the Vicomte. He scratched at the beard he was starting to grow irritably: it just hadn't seemed worth it lately to shave even half a face.  
  
[[ I can't even think her name anymore. I know it, but I don't. ]]  
  
// His beard is white, his face is lined and streaked with tears of rage //  
  
[[ It's like this music. I know what I'm trying to say, but the words. they just won't come for me anymore. Music is as much a form of speech as speech itself. even the term 'note' refers to both. But I can find no notes within me now. ]]  
  
// Thirty years ago, how the words would flow, with passion and precision! //  
  
[[ Damn you, Christine! You took my love without regard for me and that I could have lived with, but why, why, why did you take from me my music as well?! ]]  
  
// But now his mind is dark and dulled with sickness and indecision. //  
  
[[ Damn opera. Damn singers. Damn music and everything about it. ]] The sound of shredding parchment seemed to echo, quiet as it was, through the empty house and the cavern in a way that even his tricks of the voice could not. The entire cellar was as quiet as a tomb after that.  
  
// And he stares out the kitchen door //  
  
Erik's head lay on his arm on the table: one long, elegant hand stroked the once-lovely surface of the richly stained wood idly. Too many memories in this house. Too much that hurt him.  
  
// Where the sun will rise no more. //  
  
[[ I know you're up there, Christine, here for little Meg. But I cannot bear to see you again. I can't bear not to see you, but it is better if I stay here. For I know you will never darken my doorway again to brighten my life. Go back to your world of sunshine, leave your fallen Angel in his Hell. ]]  
  
Slowly, the hand that traced idle patterns ceased its tracery and came to rest on the white porcelain mask that had hid the man's face for so long. He was not aware of it, only of a peace he had never known before.  
  
~*~*~*~*~*~*~ Three days later ~*~*~*~*~*~*~  
  
(( Papa, I was a fool. ))  
  
// Some are born to move the world, to live their fantasies //  
  
Christine walked with heavy step to the grave, her black dress rustling softly in the cold sea breeze. It was dark, hiding the heavy clouds, but the wind from the Channel was icy and laden with the promise of a bitter blow soon to come.  
  
((I had the chance, for everything I ever wanted. A career as a diva, a safe home to come back to. Even love. ))  
  
// But most of us just dream about the things we'd like to be //  
  
(( But I allowed my music, my true sight, to be blinded and dazzled by a sun-haired youth who had no greater hold on me than memory, and let him draw me away from all that I could have been, everything I could have shared with. A sun-haired youth and my own fear of the night. Were they one and the same, I wonder? ))  
  
// Sadder still to watch it die, than never to have known it - //  
  
Christine's black veil, blown by the winter breeze, caught itself in her hair. The veil carried ice crystals from her breath freezing on the threads. No longer was it the pure, rich chestnut mane that once hung to her waist. Nor was her face unchanged, Though only five years had passed, those years had not lain lightly on her. Tiny wrinkles around her eyes, in another woman they might have been called laugh lines, except that Christine had not laughed very often in the years since she had left part of her spirit behind in the cellars of the Opera Populaire. Silver streaked in thin threads through her hair, though she was not halfway through her third decade.  
  
// For you, the blind who once could see //  
  
"Did I know what I was doing, Papa?" she asked the cold white marble headstone before her. An angel graced the top of it, a harp cradled in its marble hands as cold and as pale as her Angel of Music's had been. "I knew what I wanted. But I didn't realize that it could not be found in Raoul's arms."  
  
// The bell tolls for thee. //  
  
The church bells tolled slowly over the little town of Perros. Christine remembered that one beautiful, awful night here, when her Angel of Music had made one last appearance to her and her sun-haired demon had torn her from her Angel's grasp. And she had gone, she had gone willingly, oh so willingly, when she heard her betrayed Angel falling, had closed her heart and mind to the strange Angel knowing that it would come to a final confrontation!  
  
// The bell tolls for thee. //  
  
(( I saw you die, Papa, not the actuality but I knew when it happened. Then Mamma Valerius. Even the Meg I knew is dead, after that performance. And Erik. I condemned him by my own words, by my own hand. And in so doing, I lost everything that I held dear. I condemned myself to a life I have come to despise, a mindless chattel for a husband who cares more about money and politics than his marriage and his children. And, God help me, I cannot summon the spirit again to break free of this that once I called on to escape from Erik! ))  
  
// For you, the blind who once could see //  
  
Tears rolled freely down the kneeling woman's cheeks now, in time with the sonorous church bells, freezing on her cheeks in the bitter blast of the northern winter. The wind was picking up.  
  
"Do you remember the bats we saw once, Papa, or the owls?" she asked the somnolent, solemn grave. "That's what I feel like, now. I can't see in this darkness. And I've lost my music, the music that might have guided me home. I've lost it, Papa. I've finally lost it, and I can't get it back! Papa, please! Please, Angel of Music, help me find my way home!"  
  
// The bell tolls for thee. //  
  
The first flurries of snow drifted down from the dark, heavy clouds, but the grave remained as silent as always.  
  
~*~*~*~*~*~*~ The next morning ~*~*~*~*~*~*~  
  
The old man spotted something dark against the pure white of the snow. Watching it move in the stiff breeze, he was puzzled: it clearly wasn't an animal of any kind. The snow crunched under his heavy-weather boots as he walked to the base of the angel statue. It had been a sharp "nor-easterly" gale that night, and didn't look like it was going to keep this lull up for long.  
  
He touched the flapping corner of black lace - it looked familiar. Hadn't that woman yesterday.? He dug away the snow from the mound it covered, hoping against hope but afraid already of what he would find.  
  
The woman lay on her side, curled slightly as though someone held her close. But her cheek was as cold as the marble statue of the angel whose feet she lay at.  
  
"God rest your soul," he murmured, crossing himself.  
  
A few minutes later, the church bells resumed their deep, brazen tolling under the wild and lonely shrieks of the nor-easter as it screamed down from the icy hills of Scandinavia across the miles of open water, through the Channel and up the hill of Perros.  
  
// The bell tolls for thee. //  
  
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Finis  
  
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Your pardon for the shameless pun. I love puns, I've been very good about not overdoing them thus far, but it's just one of those ironies of the English language that I couldn't resist playing with this time.  
  
Please don't neglect to feed me, I adore feedback and would love to hear your thoughts!  
  
One note though: if I could put in italics in place of lyrics or whatever, I would. But I can't get Fanfiction.net to accept it from my computer and I don't know what I'm doing wrong about it, so until I do figure it out, you're going to have to live with the brackets marking lyrics and thoughts. I don't like it either, it's a pain in the arse for me to type, but please bear with me. =)  
  
Blessings, AngelCeleste85 


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